Love at perfect pitch

RIVERS are noisy places, with waterfalls and swirling currents. So when bottom-dwelling fish such as gobies want to attract a mate they must pitch their love song just right or it will go unheard.

Marco Lugli of the University of Parma, Italy, and Michael Fine of Virginia Commonwealth University at Richmond took a look at how gobies deal with the problem. They found that waterfalls produce a high-frequency din, around 200 to 500 herz, while turbulence generates a rumble below 100 Hz.

But there is a quiet window around 100 Hz, and it just so happens that the gobies' song falls in the 80 to 200-Hz range. Have gobies adapted their song? This, says Fine, "is more of a hypothesis at this point than a solid conclusion"(Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol 114 p 512).

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